You may have noticed that I have a blog. Shocking, I know. It’s predominantly composed of text, as many are, but that’s not the only content I like to share. Posts are more approachable and memorable if they contain images, sorting visualizations require Javascript frameworks, etcetera. Unfortunately, all these support files need to be stored somewhere.
This blog is hosted on Blogger, a decision I’m very happy with. Blogger doesn’t do arbitrary file hosting (that I know of), but it does support pushing images to Picasa. So images are hosted by Picasa, another Google service, no sweat. Now, what about other files?
Hmm.
It turns out the answer to this question is a lot trickier than I would have hoped. I was hoping for another Google service, to keep my dependencies down, so I started with Sites.
Google Sites
“Google Sites is a free and easy way to create and share webpages”, the tagline goes. And it is – we use it internally all the time. One quick form later, I have a site, and another couple clicks puts a single attachment on it. Great! Update the post to reference it, double-check in incognito mode, and my work here is done. Right?
Well…not quite. It turns out that Sites uses some interesting redirect magic to actually link you to your content. Redirect magic that, for reasons I don’t understand, doesn’t actually resolve when you’re using it to hotlink content. For exactly this reason I guess, I don’t know. Anyways, since I had visited this content while on Sites, my browser had it cached, and even incognito mode could access it, but it wouldn’t resolve anywhere else. Which is a good reason to test things on more than one computer, I suppose.
Ok, not sites. App Engine?
Google App Engine
App Engine does do static file hosting. Instructions are here – you must simply download the SDK, create the app.yaml file appropriately, upload your new App (the files must belong to something, after all), etc. This looks doable, but certainly non-trivial. I also cannot figure out how this is going to be priced, nor the latency to expect from it. So let’s keep looking.
I’m running out of Google services (I considered and rejected a few more). Time to look further afield. I don’t know of any good, trustworthy solutions offhand, and a quick search isn’t taking me anywhere I really want to go, so lets look at Amazon AWS. They have a service for every occasion, right?
Amazon AWS
As it turns out, yes, yes they do. A quick look through the options (there are so many!) says that Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will do nicely, optionally backed by CloudFront if I ever really need to scale. A quick signup, upload of my files, and one new CNAME, and I’ve got my files living under static.thelowlyprogrammer.com, backed by S3. Nice! Doubly so since the free usage tier should make this entirely free for the next year or so, and pennies after.
Finally, in researching this blog post, I found one more option. And it’s a Google service, which was my original goal. Let’s check it out!
Google Cloud Storage
New on the block, Google Cloud Storage appears to be a competitor to Amazon S3. Priced a tiny bit cheaper, the features seem roughly comparable. The documentation is a bit rough still, which partly explains why I didn’t figure this out earlier, but everything is there if you look hard enough. One significant distinction is that you do not choose where data is stored (unless you want to add restrictions), and it will get replicated wherever needed. Note that this includes automatic edge caching for popular files, so this is pretty much S3 and CloudFront all rolled into one. Fancy! It supports the same CNAME aliases, so I’ve got this set up as a hot-spare for my S3 data. I’ll leave S3 as primary for now since I’ve got it all configured and tested happily, but it looks like I’d be well served either way.
Maybe in a future post I’ll do a head-to-head comparison of S3 and GCS, if I can figure out a fair way of measuring performance all over the globe. Until then, I’m happy to stick with either.
Mission accomplished – static files hosted. Time for bed.
I'm Eric Burnett, a software engineer at Google. I'm interested in studying what makes programmers tick, and writing whatever code strikes my fancy. Read my 
You could also have used Heroku for this. You can configure it to serve static sites, including resources. And the free account should be more than enough horsepower for static resources on a blog.
ReplyDeleteThanks Gabe, that's good to know. Looking at it, it looks like it would be along the lines of App Engine - creating a custom app with the soul purpose of serving static files. Is that a fair assessment?
DeleteYeah, that's fair. You'd need a few lines of Rack config to tell it you're serving a static site, and then you could just dump all your assets in.
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